The Oppenheimer Report 9/4/17

If you're a boomer like me, you have probably had one or two problems with advanced technology. It's one of my pet peeves, and my feeling is "don't fix it if it ain't broke." For 25 years I have been ranting about the thousands of ways advancements in technology have complicated my life. I remember the Stone Ages., when VCRs were  big clunky machines and programming them to record was a complicated series of steps involving tiny  buttons that were hard to find. When I bought my 2016 Honda Pilot, it did not come with an owner’s manual booklet; it came with a CD. I popped it into my computer, I was astonished to find it was 500 pages long. There is a whole section devoted to the many ways one can program the doors to unlock. The feature which continues to give me the most aggravation is the radio. I am baffled by the mentality behind a touch screen radio. First of all, it must be “refreshed” every time the car is turned on. This is a two-step process, which cannot be done with the controls on the steering wheel. One must physically go through two screens to get to the default settings. Anything involving a touch screen is difficult to operate while driving a car. In the good old days, my car radio turned on when the car turned on. Changing stations was the simple push of a preset button or the twist of a knob. Touch screens are a horrible distraction in a moving car. Why is it illegal to operate a cell phone in one’s car, but there is no specific law against staring at my touch screen radio for 10 seconds, trying to figure out why it is not responding to my touch?

Where does the time go? One minute I'm snow blowing the driveway, dreaming of warmer weather, and in the blink of an eye, summer's almost over. Certainly, this summer will go down in the record books as a bit of a wash. As I sit down to write this report on Monday morning the remnants of Hurricane Harvey, which deluged Houston Texas last week and left hundreds of thousands homeless, is soaking our neck of the woods. While our summer weather here in the Northeast was unusually rainy and cold, we did not experience the devastating wildfires that raged in the west. I communicated with my cousin in Corvallis, Oregon yesterday and he told me that his state is on fire, “from the south coast to the Cascades”, and the air quality where he resides is horrible. All summer we heard about the hundreds of out-of-control wildfires in BC, Alberta, and now Manitoba. With the latest devastation in Houston, Texas and the surrounding area, the news is all about climate change. Once again, I humbly suggest you can’t fight Mother Nature. No doubt about it, the planet is heating up. Unlike our saber-rattling Commander-Of-Tweets, I don’t deny the existence of climate change, or even that mankind has likely accelerated the cycle. I simply think that this is not something we will or can control.

Weather patterns are cyclical, and if one traced the history of weather on earth over the past 100,000 years (weather records go back maybe 100-150 years), one will likely find cyclical patterns that are not appreciably controllable by human beings. What I find remarkable is that with all the talk about greenhouse gases, and cleaner alternative forms of energy, are we taking proper steps to adapt to these inevitable changes? Are we doing anything to curtail unsustainable population growth? Have we effectively addressed the control of shoreline development and development in general? Are we constructing roofs and pavement made out of reflective white materials to deflect the sunlight? Do we have effective flood and disaster plans in place to protect us against the kind of hurricane that just flooded Houston? The list goes on, and the answer is a resounding no, we simply react. I’ve always wondered why we don’t divert rain water from rain-soaked areas to arid regions. We don’t seem to have problems building trans-continental pipelines to transport oil (other than ignoring the protests of the indigenous peoples whose lands are affected). 

Hey, what do I know, I’m just some ranting schmuck who has the carbon footprint of Sasquatch. I know I’m a part of the problem.  This week’s entry was inspired by one of my earliest “reports”, written August 31, 1992. Cat 5 Hurricane Andrew had just wiped southern Florida clean off the map, and I’d never seen another storm of that magnitude in my life. That was 25 years ago. We didn't look before we leaped and and now the horse is barking up the wrong tree with both oars out of the water. Whether or not we figure out this adjusting-to-nature thing, she’ll just continue to steam roll over us until we adjust or perish. Mother Nature doesn’t give a flying Walenda if we drive a Prius or a Hummer. Neither of them floats, by the way. Happy Labour Day to my twelve loyal readers. Gotta go now. The leaves are turning and I think I'll go fire up the snowblower ... you know, just to make sure it works.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED